To end this spooky season on the most appropriate day of this month, October 31, 2026, I’m blogging on ghosts and hauntings!
When I finally realized a childhood dream and published my first book in October of 2015, I never expected it would be a ghost mystery story. After retiring from law enforcement and armed with a vivid imagination, years of police adventures, unique experiences, and war stories from some of the best colleagues I ever worked with, I was ready to write suspense and police thrillers. Instead, genealogy, an entirely different type of sleuthing, took me down another path. With tracing family ancestry as the basis for my True Colors Series, I created a series with modern-day characters facing ghosts from the past.
I don’t even believe in ghosts or haunted places! Maybe in the spirit world some restless souls have unfinished business before they find peace. That's about the limit of my thinking on the topic.
As an avid bookworm growing up, I spent my time reading—no, devouring—teen sleuth stories, mainly Trixie Belden and Nancy Drew mysteries. The Hardy Boys and other popular mysteries also got their fair share of my attention. I didn’t aspire to be a police officer at the time, but maybe these was a subconscious influence on my future career as one.
So how did it come to pass that ghosts and haunted places took over the keyboard when I began my writing? I thought back to my childhood and about some of the unexpected influences that might have shape my adult writing.
At about age 10, I read my first “ghost” story. The Mystery of the Haunted Hut had it all for me—teen investigators, mysterious clues, and the hint of ghosts. I was hooked and even tried my hand at writing my own little mystery story (literally by hand in a composition book from school). I wrote to Whitman Books and Grosset and Dunlap, the main publishers of the books I read, asking how to publish my book. They each wrote back with a nice reply basically saying that it takes years to get published but I should continue to write my stories, mimeograph them (yes, the famous old machines were still in use) staple them into booklets and distribute to my family and friends. They also suggested to “write what I know,” which has proven to be sage advice.
My idea of ghosts is probably influenced from a single picture I vaguely remember—a sketch in a Compton’s Encyclopedia of a scraggly old ghost, in a nightcap and gown, maybe with chains at his feet, going up an old staircase. The elusive image pops up every so often when I write. Something about those Victorian images of a drafty old mansion with a transparent ghost ascending a spiral staircase and an orb of light floating nearby has been etched into my imagination. Also, around that same time, Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol, starring Mr. Magoo as Scrooge, aired. It may have aired in color, but we did not have a color television at the time. I grew up to like other early versions of this Dickens classic, preferably in black and white. Only recently, I realized the plot of the original story always intrigued me because of its theme of ghosts and time travel.
The ultimate childhood memory that may have influenced my penchant for ghosts was the movie
The Uninvited, starring Ray Milland. As a child, I watched this movie on our local Friday night Shock Theater show. This eerie black and white movie scared the bejeebers out of me! I’ve watched it several times over the years, and while the movie itself no longer scares me, I still experience how it made me feel back in the day, scaring me yet forcing me to watch every minute in frozen intrigue. Emphasizing secrets hidden in long, dark shadows, breezes wafting where they did not belong, mysterious scents and lights tormenting the heroine…these clever elements, in one way or another, have certainly shaped some ghostly events in my stories.
Did those black and white images enhance my interest, or did my own imagination place me square in the middle of things that go bump in the night? Whichever it was, that shivery suspense somehow managed to overpower my real-life adventures and find its way into the heart of my stories.
My goal as a writer is for my readers to become part of my stories, to experience that moment of suspense and uncertainty that my characters experience. I want them to smell the pipe smoke, feel unseen fingers stroke their face, and have that shiver run through their veins that raises the hair on the backs of their necks. I don’t want to necessarily frighten them…but I want it to grip them, so they remember how that scene made them feel!
All in a hauntingly good way, of course!
by Allie Marie - Author of books with history, mystery, and heart!
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